Sometimes Living more Lightly is short and simple. Of course there are other times when it takes more time than I would like and feels complicated. This week I’ve had a little of both.

Simple: Over the Christmas holidays we had a lot of guests. One of our guests treated us to a number of bottles of wine which came in a handy cloth bag with separators for each bottle. Great! But we already had one of those bags and saw no reason to keep two. Easy solution just return the extra bag on our next trip to Krogers. Took 1 minute max.PS 2020-2: I just did another simple recycling – Since we got several new items as Christmas gifts, I had a clock, robe, and slacks that were now duplicates. I took the easy way and called VietVets for a home pick-up. It’s not the most satisfying recycling effort since it’s very impersonal, but it sure is easy – took probably 30 seconds.

Not So Simple: With the holidays I also procrastinated clearing my desk (and floor) of papers from several different projects I had been working on – wanted to spend the time being present to our family and guests. Good choice. BUT this meant it was complicating my life to find which papers went to which project. Of course I have over the years developed a filing system and trays for my paperwork. One would think that it was simply a matter of sorting the papers into the appropriate locations. One would be wrong. Part of the reason I procrastinated is that even with 2 filing cabinets, 8 trays and 10 file separators, they were all becoming stuffed. I knew I would need to prune through the older file folders and this would take some time.

Finally I forced myself to set aside at least half a day to do this. 3 ½ hours later I was done. Now I have a lot more paper to put in curbside recycling. Yea!

Solutions: So what tasks have you found simple solutions for? What have you been procrastinating about? What has helped you get over inertia? Do you reward yourself? Tell someone to keep yourself accountable? Lock yourself in until it’s done? Give up and let it pile up?

Thanks to Anya for reminders of the 1 in-1 out principle and suggestions of additional things to donate. Now, those pesky papers 🙁 It’s hard to motivate oneself to really prune a file cabinet. Any ideas beyond just committing to a length of time for a drawer/cabinet and then biting the bullet and doing it.
And thanks to Jim for the creative use of a reusable bag with separators in it. I hadn’t thought of that. Now maybe i have to buy more wine to get another bag. 🙂

Or…instead of re-donating the wine bag back to the store, you could have tacked it up in your garage to hold various gardening and repair tools, like a gardening fork, trowel, paper towels and old tennis balls.

Actually, one of my favorite organizing solutions is a small whiteboard with some eraseable markers that I…um…liberated from the college workroom. Great for listing chores and grammatical errors to avoid.

I’ve been stalling on paperwork organizing— four kids! all those school papers they brought home! Not to mention the filing cabinet which really doesn’t need to have most of the stuff we keep. Oh, and the photos. I do better with physical items— this year we’ve donated excess Christmas stuff, mugs, water bottles, and some books (were trying to do one-in/one-out, and that was our response to the Christmas gifts.)